Distemper of the Blood

The pump spell that wants to be thrown away rather than played. Cast for its printed cost, it is a sorcery: +2/+2 and trample until end of turn, a rate that has been outpaced for decades and one that, being a sorcery, cannot fire mid-combat at all. Madness is where the design actually lives, dropping the price to a single red mana the moment the card leaves your hand by discard instead of by being played. That reframes the whole transaction. Rather than holding a card you mean to spend, you hold one you mean to pitch, then cash it in cheaply off a loot, a rummage, or any forced-discard outlet. The timing shifts with it: because the madness trigger lets you cast the spell as the discard resolves, the effect can resolve on a turn when you would normally have no use for a sorcery, the cost-discount line itself being the payoff rather than any particular combat moment. Trample is the operative clause, since +2/+2 on an attacker already facing a chump blocker accomplishes nothing without it; the spell exists to shove damage past an overmatched blocker rather than to win a fight outright, and that math only matters on your own attack. The appeal is entirely the discard-discount line madness enables. Strip the engine that feeds it from hand and you are left with the least interesting version of itself.